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Notes -
I recently read The Elephant in the Brain and a review of it (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/book-review-the-elephant-in-the-brain/)
One of the main ideas is that humans have competitive tendencies that helps them gain access to limited resources and mates. Humans need to signal that they are a good ally and mate in order to get some of the things that they desire. Instead of directly signaling (such as trying to impress people with our bank statement) people send indirect signals (such as wearing expensive clothes). Signaling indirectly gives us plausible deniability and even allows us to deceive ourselves (example: I wasn’t wearing expense clothes to show off my wealth, I just wore them because I like the way they look).
The book goes through Body Language, Laughter, Conversation, Consumption, Art, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion and Politics to explain hidden motives. Examples:
Conversation isn’t just about exchanging information it is also about signaling intelligence and social skills.
Politics isn’t just about policy, it is also about alliances.
What are some hidden motives that you’ve noticed?
Some I’ve noticed is dancing is about signaling social confidence to potential mates. Brightly colored hair usually signals loyalty to left-leaning politics, the signal is costly because non-leftists may detect the signal and be biased against the signaler.
It’s interesting to think that the Muslim world might be onto something by banning the female appearance competition spiral. If the thesis of the book is correct, then it’s never enough for a religion to say “don’t entertain vanity” — instead the religion must actively punish vanity and reinforce less vain competition. The fundamentalist Muslim world just says “every woman wears this plain garb, period”, and in one fell swoop they have immediately restore six hours a week of labor to every woman, billions of dollars kept in middle class pockets, improved grades, etc. Because now the marriage-driven and reputation-driven competition over appearances is eliminated, and women now are forced to look for other ways to compete against each other. An entire % of brain activity is redirected to something that is, at least in theory, better for everyone’s happiness.
Another question: is virtue signaling bad, or is it only bad when the signal lacks substance? If moral action is induced by a person displaying his own morality, then why not support that? Our concern then should just be ensuring that the “moral competition” has the correct exemplars and rules, so that the substance lines up with the competition. So a person who is being “Christ-like” by practicing humility would be, counterintuitively, obtaining reinforcement by his community which all believe in such a moral exemplar — and this would be good, and not bad, because it’s making the most of human nature.
So a lot of moral implications hinge on the question of this book: is human behavior, pessimistically and ultimately, always decided by what gives the most ”primal” rewards?
I think virtue signaling itself is neutral, it is just communicating a fact about your beliefs to the world. The problems related to virtue signaling are:
If someone has what they believe is a virtue, but it is actually something bad for society.
The virtue signaling competition where people need to come up with more extreme signals to stand out. Then the signal becomes ridiculing the out group in extreme hyperbole that some people can misinterpret as literal.
Per the OP’s book, virtue signaling would not just be communicating a belief but communicating a positive value of yourself to others. And if this is done implicitly, then perhaps we can say that all morality hinges on signaling virtue. If that’s the case, our priority should be fleshing out good competitive parameters and norms for how we judge virtue to maximize moral actions.
In other words, it may be a bad idea to ignore the idea of signaling virtue (as an inherently virtue-less activity), and instead accept it as underlying all morality, in spite of what certain Christian teachings posit, and if develop a great criteria for judging real virtue from false, we would increase sum total virtue.
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